A Hardware Environment for Prototyping and Partitioning Based on Multiple FPGAs

Abstract This paper presents a multiple-FPGA-based experimentation board. The problem to be solved is that of implementing a circuit into a set of FPGAs. This board provides a hardware environment that can be used either as a prototyping board, allowing to test circuit designs, or as a hardware support for practically test and optimize partitioning algorithms. The former use address the problem of rapid prototyping while the latter is a contribution to the domain of hardware/software codesign. The environment consists of the printed circuit board itself, a set of Xilinx FPGAs, static RAM, a parallel and a serial interface. In this paper, the structure o f the board will be p r esented, by pointing out its simplicity, power and exibility